Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race

With a lot of mindless computer work to do, I just had time to check out another Skeptoid episode, this one on race (“There’s No Such Thing as Race… Or Is There?“). You can listen to it here:

Wow, I am really impressed! So frequently when I hear people try to tackle the subject of race from a scientific perspective, they get things massively wrong (I wish we could get Jerry Coyne, who is consistently confused [for example, see 1, 2] about the science — or lack thereof — of “human races”, to listen to this episode). But Brian Dunning totally nails it in this episode: he both elegantly explains that there’s no genetic classification that matches our cultural ideas of race and explains why race continues to be a concept that’s used in medicine and other biological sciences. I love his conclusion that as science becomes better at understanding the meaning of our individual genetic make-ups, the value of race as a very rough correlation will eventually decline to zero.